Saturday, September 16, 2006

SPACE FAUXTOGRAPHY ?

On September 18, Iranian-born, Dallas businesswoman Anousheh Ansari (bio here) and two astronauts are scheduled to blast off in a Russian Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Ansari replaced Japanese-born businessman Daisuke Enomoto, who was pulled from the flight for medical reasons.

The Iranian news media has not made too much of the first Iranian woman scheduled to go into space, but there have been a number of reports about it and this Iranian space site has a number of pictures.

So it is interesting to me that one of the photos has clearly been photoshopped from the original Energia site:

It is getting tiresome to point out how photographs are being manipulated by various media with ideological agendas, but this would seem to represent one more example of the insanity--this time culled from the space environment.

To be completely fair, other photographs of Ansari at the Iranian site and in the Iranian press show her hair without cover-up. This particular example might only be attributed to one over-zealous protector of public morals.

But just one is one too many. And it makes you wonder how much the news media is distorting truth, when it has a mind to fake the news.

UPDATE: I received this comment from someone at the Iranian space link, which notes that they picked up the photo from ISNA and that they are not a government website:

Dear Pat Santy,Thank you very much for your interesting to our website. I published that news and my source was ISNA. I didnt change any picture from Ms. Ansari as you can see so many pictures from anousheh without any scarf in spacescience.ir website. I just pick the picture up from ISNA and paste it in my pages."Space Science" is not a govermental website and we never thinking that seeing ladies hair have any problem.We just are a Scientific NGO that are looking for Space Science and Technology Developing for peace in our country. Please do a favor for me and let your readers know about it.Thank you very much in advance.